The Mojave Desert From the West

North America, for the most part, is a very dry continent.  While there are places such as south eastern Mexico, southern Florida, and the Pacific coast stretching from Alaska to northern California that do receive a regular abundance of precipitation, days can go by without a cloud passing overhead, and drought can affect much of the land.  In the west, extremely tall mountain ranges running from north to south catch any moisture that would manage to evaporate from the cool Pacific ocean, leaving a vast tract of desert from British Columbia all the way down to central Mexico on the leeward slopes.  The contrast between the land blessed by rain and starved of it is always rather dramatic.

Here we see the Mojave desert as viewed from the San Bernardino mountains.   The forested slopes sharply give way to the desert scrub of the lower elevations at around 4,500 feet above sea level.  The land can sometimes be so parched that high winds can throw around the sands in a veil of dust that can cut visibility to almost nothing.  Further north, in the Sierra Nevadas, the western slopes receive an abundance of snow which enables the growth of the mighty sequoia forests.

On the other side of these mountains?  The northern, and driest parts of the Mojave desert, including Death Valley, which receives less than 2 inches of rain per year.  The Mojave is framed by remarkable mountains to the west and east, and by two other deserts to the north and south.  Like the Great Plains, it keeps the different parts of North America from spreading into one another.  In this case, California remains isolated from the mountain forests of the interior west, one of the many reasons why the great trees of her mountains and coasts no longer exist beyond her fortunate lands.  While it does serve as gatekeeper, the Mojave also benefits from the biodiversity found on its edges, and like the Plains, is an interesting expanse to look out on. The open, seemingly barren lands, rather than deterring explorers, have thus long since invited them closer.